Lo-Quality WoW

Last night was not exactly one of my best moments as a raider.  Or just as a guild member.  I essentially was the guy I always hate when I run with them.  And it’s killing me over and over…

It started out well.  I ran through my daily quests, picking up the Fungalophobia and Help the Bombardier! I’m the Bombardier! achievements.  Then my guild wanted to run a heroic, however I was still sitting at 328 of the 329 gear level I needed.  I knew I needed one upgrade to push me over the edge.  So my guildmate offered me a Finely-Tuned Throat Needler that he had created when he was leveling his engineering to replace the Sporeshot I’d been using.  So that was going from a 318 item to a 333, which should have been enough.  Except it wasn’t!

What was worst, they happened to group me after I had jumped on the taxi and was going to be stuck travelling for several minutes.  So they were waiting for me, thinking I just needed this one piece in order to join them, and it wasn’t enough!  And feeling bad, I lost my temper, ran to the auction house, bought a pair of Bloodied Dragonscale Bracers, which are PvP gear but I knew it would push me over329. 

Then we queue for the random heroic and we ended up in the new Heroic:Deadmines.  Which would be nice, except for the fact that I’d forgotten about the Heroic mode so I hadn’t read a single thing about that instance!  I went in absolutely cold and I was pissed at myself at this point because I was doing every single thing a bad guildmate would do. 

Fortunately, my raiding experience helped for the most part.  Managed to pull off the Ready for Raiding and Prototype Prodigy achievements.  Rockslicer dropped from Admiral Ripsnarl, which neither our Druid or our other Hunter needed, so defaulted to me which was good because I think my roll was like a 4.  Then I got the I’m on a Diet achievement and to be honest, I’m still not entirely sure what was going on during that fight.  Then we took out Vanessa VanCleef, gaining us the Heroic:Deadmines achievement and that was definitely a surprising fight.  I barely managed to figure out the various nightmare fights or using the ropes in time. 

During that run, we did wipe a couple of times, fortunately I only caused one of them.  And that was during the Mechanical Nightmare where I was so focused on avoiding the rods of lightning that I went to far and engaged the boss.  And being good guildmates, the rest tried to pull my butt out of the battle, which didn’t work since we actually lost one of our other dps to the lightning thingys.  But again, I felt rather guilty about it all.

Then we decided we had just enough people to do a run against Baradin Hold, a place I hadn’t explored yet!  And what made it worst, my connection went absolutely crazy at that point.  I arrived at Tol Barad and I was only receiving maybe 1 out of ever 4 messages on the raid channel and some mobs would suddenly attack me and other wouldn’t.  So I ended up getting lost and having to reset my WoW client.

And when I got back on, I had no idea where the heck I was.  I had to wait until a couple of them could come back out and summon me.  So, once again, I was delaying the guild.  Then we went against Argaloth, again since I hadn’t thought we’d be raiding for a week or two, I hadn’t studied up on it.  Fortunately, they gave a brief rundown before we went but we were running up against the timer for the next battle so we went for it.

For the most part, it seemed straightforward.  We went through the first rotation and past the first Fel Firestorm with no problem.  Then our off-tank died.  We eventually got him back up but then I got killed by a Meteor Slash and I’m not entired sure there was anything I could do for it.  And while I wasn’t the best dps, losing my dps caused issues with trying to beat the enrage and we didn’t make it.  Not entirely my fault but again, I felt like it was sort of my fault.

Feeling a little down, I stayed around for the actual battle.  And once again, I had no idea what was going on.  I just knew to go to a location and kill horde.  Somehow, someway, I did pretty well.  Actually, enough so that I was wondering if people weren’t used to doing PvP in general or maybe they’re not used Hunters because some of them seemed absolutely surprised by some of the tricks I pulled out of my bag.  Then again, I know a lot of Hunters who don’t bother with  Wyvern Sting or Scatter Shot or even Freezing Trap.  I know this Rogue chased me around part of the battlefield and I used all three of those tricks to stay far enough away from him that I was able to whittle him down and kill him.

Either way, we won, and I’m still not even sure why or how but after the fight I ended up with the Towers of Power, For Whom the Barad Tols and Tol Barad Victory achievements.  Then everyone gathered together, which I thought was for a turn in but it ended up being for the dailies, of which I didn’t know anything about those either.  I did finish a bunch of them but it was getting rather late at that point so I stopped.

Thus last night was a success personally.  I did my first heroic, got to try the new battleground and racked up several achievements.  But I failed as a guildie and a raider and frankly to me that’s what makes it a bad night for me.  Tonight we’re supposed to go back in to Baradin Hold again, but we’ll see how that goes.  At least this time I’ll know what’s going on.  Which reminds me, I’d better go study my instances…